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Slasher Film

A slasher film is a film in the sub-genre of horror films involving a violent psychopath stalking and murdering a group of people, usually by use of bladed tools.[1] Although the term "slasher" is often used informally as a generic term for any horror film involving murder, film analysts cite an established set of characteristics which set these films apart from other sub-genres, such as splatter films and psychological thrillers.[2]

Definition

Slasher films adhere to a specific formula: a past wrongful action causes severe trauma that is reinforced by a commemoration or anniversary that reactivates or re-inspires the killer.[7][8] Built around stalk-and-murder sequences, the films drawn upon the audience's feelings of catharsis, recreation, and displacement, as related to sexual pleasure.[9]

Common tropes

The final girltrope is discussed in film studies as being a young woman (occasionally a young man) left alone to face the killer's advances in the movie's end.[7]Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the heroine in Halloween, is an example of a typical final girl.[8] Final girls are often, like Laurie Strode, virgins amongst sexually active teens.[10]

Origins

A scene from the Grand Guignol, a format some critics have cited as an influence on the slasher film

The appeal of watching people inflict violence upon each other dates back thousands of years to Ancient Rome,[13] though fictionalized accounts became marketable with late 19th century horror plays produced at the Grand Guignol.[14]Maurice Tourneur's The Lunatics (1912) used visceral violence to attract the Guignol's audience; films like this eventually led to public outcry in the United States, eventually passing the Hays Code in 1930.[15] The Hays Code is one of the entertainment industry's earliest set of guidelines restricting sexuality and violence deemed unacceptable.[15][16]

1960s Horror-Thrillers

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) used visuals that had been deemed unacceptable by movie studios, including scenes of violence, sexuality, and even the shot of a toilet flushing.[28] That same year Michael Powell released Peeping Tom, showing the killer's perspective as he murders women to photograph their dying expressions.[3][29]

Italy's giallo thrillers are crime procedurals or murder mysteries interlaced with eroticism and psychological horror.[44]Giallo films feature unidentified killers murdering in grand fashions.[44] Unlike most American slasher films the protagonists of gialli are frequently (but not always) jet-setting adults sporting the most stylish Milan fashions.[22] These protagonists are often outsiders reluctantly brought into the mystery through extenuating circumstances, like witnessing a murder or being suspected of the crimes themselves.[51] Much like Krimi films, gialli plots tended to be outlandish and improbable, occasionally imploring supernatural elements.[44][22]Sergio Martino's Torso (1973) featured a masked killer preying upon beautiful and promiscuous co-eds in retribution for a past misdeed. Torso's edge-of-your-seat climax finds a "final girl" facing off with the killer in an isolated villa.[52][53]Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) is a whodunit depicting creative death sequences on a lakeside setting, and greatly inspired Friday the 13th (1980) and its 1981 sequel.[54]Gialli were popular in American cinemas and drive-in theaters, though they were much more heavily censored than in Europe, where British ads promoted sex and nudity over thrills and violence.[51] The British thriller Assault (1971) and Spanish mystery A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1974) share many traits with Italian gialli.[55]Death Steps in the Dark (1977) spoofed the familiar conventions found in giallo films.[56] Despite successes from Deep Red (1975) and The Blood-Stained Shadow (1978), giallo films gradually fell out of fashion by the mid-1970s as diminishing returns forced budget cuts.[44] Films such as Play Motel (1979) and Giallo a Venezia (1979) exploited their low-budgets with shocking hardcore pornography.[57]

Following holiday-themed exploitation films Home for the Holidays (1972), "All Through the House"(1972) and Silent Night, Bloody Night (1973), Black Christmas (1974) uses horror as a board to debate social topics of its time, including feminism, abortion, and alcoholism. Utilizing the "killer calling from inside the house" gimmick, Black Christmas is visually and thematically a precursor to John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), as young women are terrorized in a previously safe environment during an iconic holiday. Like Halloween, Clark's film opens with a lengthy point-of-view, but it differs in the treatment of the killer's identity. Despite making $4,053,000 on a $620,000 budget, Black Christmas was initially criticized, with Variety complaining that it was a "bloody, senseless kill-for-kicks" flick that exploited unnecessary violence. Despite its modest initial box office run, the film has garnered critical reappraisal, with film historians noting its importance in the horror film genre and some even citing it as the original slasher film.[62]

Golden Age (1978-1984)

Jumpstarted by the massive success of John Carpenter's Halloween, the era commonly cited as the Golden Age of slasher films is 1978-1984, with some scholars citing over 100 similar films released over the six-year period.[22][9][5] Despite most films receiving negative reviews, many Golden Age slasher films were extremely profitable and have established cult followings.[6] Many films reused Halloween's template of a murderous figure stalking teens, though they escalated the gore and nudity from Carpenter's retrained film. Golden Age slasher films exploited dangers lurking in American institutions such as high schools, colleges, summer camps, and hospitals.[63]

When shown an early cut of Halloween without a musical score, all major American studios declined to distribute it, one executive even remarking that it was not scary. Carpenter added music himself, and the film was distributed locally in four Kansas City theaters through Akkad's Compass International Pictures in October 1978. Word-of-mouth made the movie a sleeper hit that was selected to screen at the November 1978 Chicago Film Festival, where the country's major critics acclaimed it. Halloween grew into a major box office success, grossing over $70 million worldwide and selling over 20 million tickets in North America, becoming the most profitable independent film until being surpassed by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990).[66]

1979

Though the telekinesis slasher Tourist Trap was initially unsuccessful, it has undergone a reappraisal by fans. 1979's most successful slasher was Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls, which sold 8.5 million tickets in North America. Its success has largely been credited to its opening scene, in which a babysitter (Carol Kane) is taunted by a caller who repeatedly asks, "Have you checked the children?"[67] Less successful were Ray Dennis Steckler's burlesque slasher The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher and Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer, both of which featured gratuoitous on-screen violence against vagrant people.

1980

The election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th President of the United States drew in a new age of conservatism that ushered concern of rising violence on film.[22][1] The slasher film, at the height of its commercial power, also became the center of a political and cultural maelstrom. Sean S. Cunningham's sleeper hit Friday the 13th was the year's most commercially successful slasher film, selling nearly 15 million tickets in North America.[68] Despite a financial success, distributor Paramount Pictures was criticized for "lowering" itself to release a violent exploitation film, with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously despising the film; Siskel, in his Chicago Tribune review, revealed the identity and fate of the film's killer in an attempt to hurt its box office and provided the address of the chairman of Paramount Pictures for viewers to complain.[69] The MPAA was criticized for allowing Friday the 13th an R rating, but its violence would inspire gorier films to follow, as it set a new bar for acceptable levels of on-screen violence. The criticisms that began with Friday the 13th would lead to the genre's eventual decline in subsequent years.[70]

In Canada, whodunitCurtains had a brief theatrical life before finding new life on VHS, while criticism toward American Nightmare's portrayal of prostitutes, drug addicts, and pornography addicts hurt its video rentals.[82]Sledgehammer was shot-on-video for just $40,000, with a gender-reversal climax showing Playgirl model Ted Prior as a "final guy."[22][71] Other home video slashers from the year include Blood Beat,Double Exposure, and Scalps, the latter claiming to be one of the most censored films in history.[82] Releases began to distance from the genre. The poster for Mortuary features a hand is bursting from the grave, though the undead have nothing to do with the film. Distributors were aware of fading box office profits, and they were attempting to hoodwink audiences into thinking long-shelved releases like Mortuary were different.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter brought the saga of Jason Voorhees to a close, with his demise the main marketing tool. It worked, with The Final Chapter selling 10-million tickets in North America, hinting the franchise would continue even if Jason's demise marked a shift in the genre.[71] This shift was emphasized by controversy from Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984): Protesters picketed theaters playing the film with placards reading, "Deck the hall with holly - not bodies!" Despite other Christmas-themed horror films, including the same year's Don't Open till Christmas, promotional material for Silent Night, Deadly Night featured a killer Santa with the tagline: "He knows when you've been naughty!" Released in November 1984 by TriStar Pictures, persistent carol-singers forced one Bronx cinema to pull Silent Night, Deadly Night a week into its run. Soon widespread outrage led to the film's removal, with only 741,500 tickets sold.[84][71]

As interest in the Golden Age slasher waned, Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street revitalized the genre by mixing fantasy and horror in a cost-effective way. Craven had toyed with slasher films before in Deadly Blessing (1981), though he was frustrated the genre he had helped create with The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) had not benefited him financially. Developing A Nightmare on Elm Street since 1981, Craven recognized time running out due to declining revenues from theatrical slasher film releases.[85]A Nightmare on Elm Street and especially its villain Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) became cultural phenomenons.[86] On a budget of just $1.8 million the film sold over 7 million tickets in North America and launched one of the most successful film franchises in history.[71][86]A Nightmare on Elm Street provided the success that New Line Cinema needed to become major Hollywood company; to this day, New Line is referred to as "The House That Freddy Built."[87] The final slasher film released during the Golden Age, The Initiation, was greatly overshadowed by A Nightmare on Elm Street, (though both films feature dreams as plot points and a horribly burned "nightmare man").[22] The success of A Nightmare on Elm Street welcomed in a new wave of horror films that relied on special effects, almost completely silencing the smaller low-budget Golden Age features.[88][22][1]

Bronze Age (1996-2003)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) utilized characters from his original Elm Street film in self-referential and ironic ways, as the actors played versions of their true personas targeted by a Freddy Krueger-inspired demon. New Nightmare sold a meager 2.3 million tickets the North American box office, joining a growing line of box office disappointments as audiences sought psychological thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Basic Instinct (1992) and Se7en (1995). The slasher film's surprising resurrection came in the form of Scream (1996), a box office smash and redefined the genre's rules. Directed by Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, Scream juggled postmodern humor with visceral horror. The film played on nostalgia for the Golden Age, but appealed to a younger audience with contemporary young actors and popular music. Williamson, a self-confessed fan of Halloween (1978), Prom Night (1980), and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), wrote the characters as well-versed in horror film lore and knowing all the clichés that the audience were aware of. The film sold over 22.5 million tickets in North America to become the highest grossing slasher film of all time, the first slasher film to cross $100 million at the domestic box office, and the most successful horror film since The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The marketing for Scream distanced itself from the slasher sub-genre as it passed itself as a "new thriller" that showcased the celebrity of its stars, promoting the appearances of then-popular stars Drew Barrymore, Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell over its violence.

Scream 3 (2000), the first entry in the Scream series not written by Kevin Williamson, was another huge success with 16.5 million tickets sold, though poor word-of-mouth prevented it from reaching the heights of its predecessors. Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) sold a meager 4 million tickets, less than half of what its predecessor had sold just two years earlier; both the I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend franchises were relegated to the direct-to-video market. The genre continued to fall apart with box office bombsValentine (2001) and Jason X (2002), as well as the critically maligned Halloween: Resurrection (2002), a sequel that sold less than half its predecessor's tickets. New Line Cinema's highly anticipated Freddy vs. Jason (2003), in development since 1986, took note from Scream and mixed nostalgia with recognizable actors; it sold a massive 14 million tickets at the domestic box office, acting a symbolic love-letter to slasher films of the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages.

Remakes & Reboots

As 1990s Scream-inspired slasher films dwindled in popularity, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) became a sleeper hit by playing on public's familiarity of the 1974 original but promising updated thrills and suspense. Like Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre dilute the original film's controversial aspects for maximum commercial appeal. TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre remake sold over 13.5 million tickets in North America and was followed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), which sold a respectable 6-million tickets, though it was still struck by diminishing returns.

Riding on the success of the 21st Century's Chainsaw Massacre remake was House of Wax (2005), Black Christmas (2006), April Fool's Day (2008), Train (2008). Remakes of The Fog (2005), When a Stranger Calls (2006) and Prom Night (2008) were released with PG-13 ratings to pull in the largest teenage audience possible, though only Prom Night sold more tickets than its original counterpart. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) took the simplicity of the original 1978 film but added an extreme vision that, according to critics, replaced everything that made the first film a success. Despite these criticisms, Zombie's Halloween sold nearly 8.5 million tickets, but its negative reception hurt its violent sequel Halloween II (2009), which could not sell 4.5 million tickets just two years after its predecessor. Extreme violence in the Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes hit its peak with The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and its less-well received sequel, The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007).